If you’re not of a certain age, you may not be entirely familiar with the story of Enron, the once-vaunted energy and bandwidth trading company that went down in one of the most public bankruptcy and financial scandals of all time. It all ended in 2001, with several Enron executives being charged with accounting fraud crimes and serving jail time. CEO Ken Lay only escaped a prison stint by having the decency to die of a heart attack instead. The company’s accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, was effectively shut down for its part in the scandal. I cannot stress enough that this all went down in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and still penetrated the news cycle so completely that you could not miss this story if you were an adult that was ambulatory in the early aughts.
But 23 years is a long time for our underdeveloped brains. I imagine very few people have given much thought to the story of Enron for the last decade or so, which probably made it all the more surprising when a website and social media accounts for Enron lit back up this week with an announcement that the company was back. The whole thing created a minor shitstorm on the internet, with many glomming onto the hints on the website and social media output that this was part of some cryptocurrency play by the company. You can see an example of that from Ars Technica.
Although there’s nothing specific about it in the company’s newly released information, it sounds like the relaunched Enron will create some token or coin to support energy sustainability.
I reached out to the company’s press contact and asked for more information about this and whether the new Enron had bought the old Enron name. A quick reply came from Will Chabot, who said, “We’ll have more to share soon and will be sure to keep you in the loop. Right now we have no additional comment beyond the press release.” Despite the similarity of his name to chatbot, Chabot does, in fact, seem to be a real person.
Honestly, it’s difficult to know what is going on here. In the website’s terms of use, there is a comment that references the site as “protected parody, represents performance art, and is for entertainment purposes only.” Also, this isn’t actually Enron’s original domain. It still exists here. So maybe it’s all a lark?
Yes, it’s a lark. Here’s what is actually going on here. The trademark for Enron and its branding was purchased way back in 2020 for $250 by The College Company. That company is headed up by Connor Gaydos and Peter McIndoe. And if any of those names are starting to sound familiar, it’s because they’re the crew that pranked the world with the brilliant conspiracy theory parody site, “Birds Aren’t Real,” in which they put forth the fake conspiracy theory that all the birds in America were killed off by the CIA and replaced by robot-cameras disguised as birds.
But let’s wind this back a bit and talk about how this all started with the purchase of the Enron trademark by these pranksters. As the world freaked out this week over the supposed return of Enron that never was, the irony that such confusion could be sparked by the ownership of a trademark is palpable. And, frankly, it highlights a problem with the enforcement of trademark law and registrations to begin with.
The point of trademark law at its heart is to prevent confusion in the public as to the source of a good or service. In this case, however, a trademark was bought and wielded specifically to cause that very sort of confusion. Why the Enron trademark was even still valid as a mark to be purchased this many years after the company’s collapse is unknown to me at this time, but ostensibly The College Company bought the mark to minimize any exposure in using it for this very prank. In so doing, and because the mark was never invalidated for a failure of use in commerce, you get a prankster perfectly negating the purpose of trademark law in wielding a trademark.
Pranksters are gonna prank, obviously, and I don’t have much of a problem with that. The site does list itself as parody and performance art, after all, so any discerning person ought to be able to suss out that this is all a big joke. But the lack of good hygiene in the Trademark Office allowing this to happen is a problem worth tackling, lest someone with more nefarious purposes tries to take advantage of it.
